Vedado

This guide to Vedado in Havana opens with a 1954 question structural engineers thought was reckless: could a concrete tower carry thirty-nine floors on load-bearing walls alone, no steel skeleton inside? It follows engineer Ernesto Gomez Sampera and Luis Saenz Duplace building the FOCSA on streets angled forty-five degrees to catch the sea breeze off the Malecon, with walls just thirty centimeters thick tying into a concrete lattice. Look at the corridors wrapping each floor, set apart from the building's core by a gap open to the air.